Chapter 2
ELLEN
By seven the roast had gone from rested to cooling. I'd moved it back into the warm oven twice, and the potatoes had grown the skin that good potatoes grow when they wait too long.
My hand went to the phone on the counter and stopped.
Thirty years, and I'd never once been the woman who called.
Calling meant nagging, meant I didn't trust his promise.
I did trust his promise, I told myself, my thumb resting on the cool back of the phone.
Or I'd built a whole marriage on the decision to trust it, and I wasn't going to stop tonight.
So I didn't call. I set the phone down and pressed it flat to the counter, as if holding it still could hold me still.
I lit the candles at seven because seven felt like the last honest hour to light them, and I sat at the head of the table with my mother's glasses catching the flame.
Then I got up and cut a single potato from the pan and ate it standing at the counter, so the whole day wouldn't be a waste.
It had gone cold in the center. I ate it anyway.
I knew this kind of waiting. Early on it's almost pleasant, a held-back gladness, the good kind.
Then it curdles. The food I'd cooked began to work against me: the roast tightening, the cream on the potatoes breaking, the beans going from bright green to the color of old money.
I'd built a meal for a six o'clock table, and by seven it was a meal in decline.
I opened the oven and basted the roast one more time out of habit, then closed it, then opened it again to shift the platter to the lower rack, the way you turn a patient in a bed to keep things from getting worse.
The kitchen smelled of a dinner nobody was eating.
Twice a car came down our street, headlights sweeping the ceiling of the dining room, and twice I turned toward the front hall before I could stop myself.
Twice the car went past. The second time it was the Kowalskis coming home dressed up from somewhere; I heard their doors, their voices, a whole family arriving on time.
Then their porch light went off, and the street was dark again.
I kept the phone face-down on the counter.
I turned it over once to check the ringer was on, then turned it face-down again.
A watched phone is a kind of begging. I straightened the napkin at Jack's place and turned his water glass so the etched side faced his chair.
Four o'clock, he'd promised. Now it was seven, and the place setting was still perfect, and its perfection had started to feel like something done to me rather than something I'd done.
I poured a second small glass of the good wine and didn't drink it.
I carried it to the front window instead, the way you carry a candle down a dark hall, and I looked at the maple gone black against a blacker sky.
Standing there, our twentieth came back to me, which I hadn't thought about in years.
He'd been in Chicago for a sales conference that October.
It's fine, I told everyone, we'll celebrate when he gets back.
We did, weeks later, at a restaurant where he was travel-tired and I was careful not to say anything that would spoil it.
I'd set this same table that year too, then put it away unused.
The memory didn't come as a thought so much as a taste, a meal cooked for no one, and I set the wine down.
I didn't want to give this bottle that taste.
The phone rang at four minutes past eight.
I looked at the stove clock while I dried my hands. 8:04. I picked up on the second ring. In the background, before he even spoke, I could hear it: the loose roar of a room full of men, the clink of glasses, a television calling a game, someone laughing at the end of a long story.
"El." His voice was loose the way the room was loose. Not drunk. Easy. "Hey. Listen."
"Hi."
"We just came in off eighteen. Course was slammed, we didn't finish till near dark.
" A swallow, ice against his teeth. "Here's the thing.
Stu got us a tee time in the morning, real early, and it's the good course, the one you can't usually get on.
Whole group wants to play it." A pause. Behind him a cheer went up at something on the screen.
"I'm thinking I stay over tonight, play the morning round, come back tomorrow. That okay?"
I stood in my kitchen in the green dress, the candles burning behind me on my grandmother's cloth, the roast going gray behind the oven glass. For a moment I didn't answer him at all.
Three hours south, he'd be at the nineteenth hole with a beer sweating in his hand, in a room full of men who had all, presumably, called or not called their own wives by now.
And he was asking me — kindly, the way you'd ask to push a lunch to Thursday — whether he could stay over on the night of our thirtieth anniversary.
That was the thing I couldn't get around, standing there with the phone warm against my ear: not that he wanted to stay, but that he thought the asking made it all right.
That in his head, this was him being kind.
"Is that okay?" he said again, into my silence.
I looked at the candles. Good tapers, the ivory ones, maybe a few inches of burn left in each.
"Yes," I said. "That's okay."
"You're the best." Relief, quick and warm, the relief of a man who'd gotten the answer he wanted and was ready now to go back to the game. "I'll call you in the morning. Get some rest. Love you, El."
"Love you," I said, and the line went to the loud room, then to nothing.
I set the phone down on the counter and turned it so its edge was square with the counter's edge. Then I turned off the oven, because there was no longer any reason to keep a roast warm.
No tears came. I stood with my hand still on the oven dial, waiting for them, and nothing rose. For thirty years the marriage had been leaning, a little more each year, and tonight it finished going over — no crash, nothing you could point to afterward. Some things fall too slowly to make a sound.
I sat down at my place and moved my chair so I could see both candles. And then I did the thing my hands still knew from sixteen years behind a camera. I timed the light.
I left the food where it sat, the table the way it was, and sat back down in the green dress, hands folded on my grandmother's cloth, watching the two ivory tapers spend themselves an eighth of an inch at a time.
I marked the start at 8:04, the moment of the call, because that was when the waiting had turned.
I caught myself counting under my breath the way I used to count off exposures, and I let myself do it, because it gave my mind something to hold that wasn't Jack.
I'd timed light for money. I knew how a candle burns: how it gutters when the wax pools, how the flame lengthens and leans in a draft, how the last of it drowns in its own melt, giving up not with drama but with a thread of smoke that curls once and is gone.
I knew these things the way a sailor knows weather.
I watched my anniversary candles the way I'd once watched the light fail on a hundred other people's happy evenings, waiting for the shot, except there was no shot to wait for now, only the failing itself.
The first one drowned at four minutes to ten. The second held on. Its flame sank into the pooled wax at the base of the holder, flared, leaned, then went out at 10:15.
Two hours and eleven minutes.
I said the number out loud in the empty room, the way you read a time off a stopwatch.
Two hours, eleven minutes. I'd waited longer than that for good light on a wedding day and thought nothing of it.
I had never once waited two hours for my own husband.
I sat with the number until it stopped being a number.
When the second candle went out, the smoke curled up past my mother's glasses, and I smelled the burnt-honey of a spent wick.
I sat a while longer before I moved. The kitchen had gone cold behind me, the oven ticking as it lost its heat, the chill coming up through the floor into my stocking feet.
The dining room was dark except for the light from the kitchen.
The roast sat carved by no one on its platter, the fat gone white and firm along the edge of the meat.
I didn't throw the candles away.
I got up and lifted the two holders and worked the warm stubs out with my thumbs, the wax still soft enough to give.
Two little ends of ivory taper, an inch of one, less of the other, the wicks black and bent.
I stood holding them in the dark kitchen, not knowing what to do with them, only that the trash was wrong.
So I went to the hall closet and took down the shoebox with the thirty years of cards. I laid the two candle stubs on top of the cards, on top of the eleven that said a little late, and put the lid back on. I set the box on its shelf and squared its edge to the shelf's edge.
Then I squared it again.
I went up to bed in the green dress, then changed my mind and hung it back in the closet, then lay down in the dark.
Jack called a little after noon the next day, cheerful, cold-fingered, a little stiff from the round, to say he was leaving Pinehurst and would be home by three.
That's fine, I said. I hope the good course was worth it.
He said it had been. He heard nothing in my voice. I'd put it all in a shoebox.